Theatre review: Habeas Corpus

The Menier Chocolate Factory tends to feel like London's most conservative, if not most Conservative theatre, and as such some of its safe programming choices for a coffin-adjacent audience base can translate to disinterring creaky old farces that should have stayed buried in the 20th century. But if the farce in question is an early Alan Bennett play (early, I mean he was forty but these things are relative,) and it's directed by the prolific but usually reliable Patrick Marber, I'm prone to think it might be worth checking out anyway. Unfortunately both writer and director seem to have made a colossal error of judgement where Habeas Corpus is concerned: With a plot set in a doctor's surgery and an approach that tries to dig up the darker side of farce's obsession with sex, the play feels like it could be paying homage to Joe Orton's What The Butler Saw*. Except that play's genuinely sexy, shocking and funny.

Theatre review: Allegro

Much as I have issues with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II - mainly to do with the varied and jaw-dropping ways they find to be offensive, and the fact that "Some Enchanted Evening" on a loop for three hours doesn't constitute a musical - there's no denying the position they occupy in American musical theatre - essentially regarded as its creators - and the love for them worldwide. So the fact that one of their shows has never actually been staged in the UK before has to make you wonder why, while still being fascinated to find out what it's actually like. Their third collaboration after big hits Oklahoma and Carousel, Allegro tanked on Broadway in 1947 but Southwark Playhouse's perennial re-interpreter of classic musicals, Thom Southerland, and his choreographer Lee Proud throw everything at this attempt to make sense of the story of Joseph Taylor Jr (Gary Tushaw,) a talented small-town doctor who's disillusioned when he takes a high-paying job in a big city.